Abstract:

Compulsory school attendance puts great demands on the child not only in the cognitive and social area, but also on physical fitness and the overall level of motor skills. Gross motor skills not only allow the child to move in space, but also allows him to participate in common activities - games with classmates. The level of involvement in the classroom activities symbolizes the pupil's popularity among classmates. The aim of the research is to asses the relationship between the level of gross motor skills and the self-concept of an elementary school pupils. The research group consisted of 123 pupils from primary schools in the Czech Republic attending primary school (average age 9.76 years). The data were collected within the project IGA_PdF_2020_020. The following problems were solved within the mentioned aim: is a higher level of gross motor skills reflected in a higher level of the pupil's self-concept? The second research problem was the assesment of a relationship between the level of object control skills and locomotor skills in the context of the pupil's self-concept. The research was done after obtaining the agreement of the Ethics Committee of the authors' workplace (No. 4/2020), the agreement of the primary school management with the implementation of the research and the agreement of the children's legal representatives. There were found significant correlations among all aspects of self-concepts in children. And from the point of gross motor skills was found singnificant relationship only between category physical appearance and skills. The results indicate what is confirmed by many recent researches, that gross motor skills are an important part for success within the classmates and also essential for whole compulsory school attendance. But further research on wider research group should be done to confirm these results.

Keywords:

Children, gross motor skills, elementary school, self-concept.